Latest on government shutdown, impact on CDC

And, Willie, before we let you go here, how much is the White House working directly with Congress now to bring an end to this shutdown? Yeah. Well, we saw that meeting, that in-person meeting here at the White House earlier this week. The vice president indicated yesterday that the White House is talking to members of both parties to bring an end to this shutdown. We, of course, know there will be a vote in the Senate tomorrow on that continuing resolution. We'll wait and see what the result is there for that vote, Nancy.

All right. Well, stay tuned for that. Willie James Inman, thank you. And earlier, I spoke with Yolanda Jacobs, a health communications specialist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She is also a union president representing CDC workers in Atlanta. And I asked her how the government shutdown could affect the agency. We are going to see a lot of halting as far as public health assistance funding to some of our local public health departments. Disease surveillance is basically out the window at this point because we don't have the workers available to meet the needs of the public.

That said, Yolanda, we understand the CDC is one of the agencies partially exempt from this shutdown. What exactly does that look like for you on the ground there? For us, it looks like a lot of employees that have been furloughed, and then we have those employees that are required to go in. And there won't be any pay for them. And it won't be any pay for people who are furloughed. So it just adds on to the travesty that has been happening at the agency for the past few months. And, Yolanda, talking to you here as a health communications specialist, the HHS specifically noted that CDC communications on public health information will be hampered during all of this. What kind of implications does that have on the public? It has a lot of implications because when the public does not get the information they need, sometimes we think for ourselves. And it's not a bad thing to think for yourself, but when you don't have the proper guidance that you need, the public health experience behind that, sometimes you make decisions that you live to regret. And moving now into the colder months, we're looking at flu is going to be increasing, COVID-19 is still there. It's still something that is running through Americans. So without the advice that comes, the recommendations that comes out of CDC, we could be seeing ourselves in a worse place than we currently are.